Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

July 31, 2006

Link: Byoms - Build your own mobile search has now added functionality for all the major chat clients. When it first came out it was AIM only, but if you're using Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, or any other that uses the Jabber XMPP you can use the system yourself.

Do a google search for "google is broken " and use advanced search to limit to the last year - you should (well maybe, perhaps, possibly, who can say?) get 12,900 results. Now change the date range to the past 6 months, and you get... 12,900 results. Last 3 months - same result, and any time - same result again. If you try using GooFresh for the last month for the same phrase you get the follow results (perhaps) - today: 13,600 yesterday: 13,600 last week 13,000 and the last 30 days 12,900.

Let's compare this with the results from a competent search engine, Ask. For the same phrase we get: 4 (last week), 13 (last 2 weeks), 78 (last month) 203 (last 3 months) 272 (last 6 months) 498 (last year) 975 (anytime). Ask also very kindly asks me if I want to narrow my search to 'Google is not working', but I think I've kinda worked that out now, thanks all the same.

Whisper it quietly, but I kinda think that Google needs to spend a bit of time fixing itself. What's more, this isn't a new problem either - I've kinda been aware of it for a while when I've been teaching, so I don't know how long this situation has been going on, but I'll bet money it's not a new phenomenon.

Any chance of a fix Google, or are we all still too busy working on the 'wow' factor? Of course, if you are, here's one for you.. 'Wow! Google is broken'

July 28, 2006

This is a 'well it's Friday, and what is the world coming to anyway?' sort of post. An article from Sky News Monopoly Takes A Chance On Plastic is quite sad. Apparently players will have debit cards and readers instead of the traditional cash. This is just *wrong*. Part of the pleasure of Monopoly was having a huge wad of cash sitting in front of you, all in neat little piles or in one big one with the 500s nestling next to the 1s. And the pleasure of finding a 100 that had slipped under the board that you've just rediscovered. The feeling of putting out your hand to another player and them counting out cash and seeing the pile grown in your palm.

The Monopoly spokesman says that it reflects the change in society and the advancement of technology. Well yes, I'm sure it does, but equally how many of us go out regularly and buy up the whole of Mayfair? The whole point of Monopoly is the fantasy of owning huge tracts of land and wringing the last cent out of another player - and the best way of doing that is to physically have the money in front of you; it's an integral part of the game.

I'll be interested to see if this version takes off, but I suspect (and hope) that it's a total failure.

July 25, 2006

Link: SEOmoz | Page Strength SEO Tool. This is a funky little utility that tells you how 'strong' your page/site is by looking at a wide variety of different factors. These include links to the URL, to the domain, a Google search for keywords in the title and the position of the page, age of the site, links from .edu and .gov sites (with an unfortunate US bias as a result), domain name visibility, links via delicious, DMOZ and Wikipedia and the Google pagerank.

Very helpful way that a site author can get a good indication of how well they're doing.

July 24, 2006

Link: Chainki. This is a wiki that is based on the DMOZ or Open Directory Project system. Basically it allows users to go into any section and add/edit the information that they find there. Same concept as Wikipedia, but for a directory search engine instead. It's one of those 'why didn't anyone think of it before' things. Looks ok, and it was a doddle to go in and edit links to my site.

However, there is always the concern with anything of this nature that it will end up being used by people with their own agenda to really emphasis or advertise their own site/material at the expense of everyone else. But perhaps that's just me being cynical.

It's only just started out, so there's a way to go yet, but take a look, and improve it while you're there!

Link: GuruLib Home Library. This is a resource that allows you to keep track of your book collection, movies, music and software. Looks a nice little package, and if all my books weren't in boxes in my garage I'd probably consider using it.

July 20, 2006

Link: Netvue: The image search engine with full-size results. I like this one. Type in your image search and Netvue goes away and finds matches which it displays on the screen in two ways - as an image in the main body of the screen and as a thumbshot on the side. It then runs through the images as a slideshow. I've tried it with a few searches, and it did well on all of them. If you need to find images, this one is worth taking a look at.